Why is it that although I am on vacation this week AND today is Labor Day (an official holiday), I felt the need to be DUN DUN DUUUUN PRODUCTIVE? It wasn’t until after I decided to cook beef and shrimp jollof and download Norton Antivirus on my mac that I felt as if the day wasn’t wasted?

What would it be like to not feel uneasy on days when I am not scratching off a checklist of tasks? Watching a series of funny nerd videos doesn’t feel right unless it’s balanced with a chore? Is it because I’ve always used rest and relaxation as a reward for accomplishing tasks that were at best annoying and at worse onerous?

I don’t like this feeling of unease – as if I am hiding from my responsibilities. There are always chores. Laundry is forever. Sorting through clothing to donate items is always a ghost checklist item – haunting the edges of my mind. Vacuuming, cleaning the bathroom, mopping the kitchen floor are repetitious tasks that must be done whether I do it once or five times. And how is it that the bathroom sink gets so dirty so fast? Is it the water that leaves the spots on the faucet? I mean daaaang! Come on mayne, I just wiped you two days ago!

I don’t know how to break the hold that a certain type of being productive has on me. The only times that I can indulge in movies or funny sketches without some guilt is when I am utterly wiped. At any other time, I have this opportunity cost meter ticking and weighing my actions inside my head. Opportunity cost is the only definition from my undergraduate Microeconomics that I remember. The New Oxford American Dictionary defines it as “the loss of potential gain from other alternatives when one alternative is chosen.” It’s what I miss out on when I choose one particular action over the other, so in this case, by watching funny sketches by CalebCity, I lose out on spending time reading some psychiatric articles. On the other hand, I laugh more; which is a higher benefit to me because laughter is in such short supply these days. 

Additionally, this pandemic got us all off-kilter! Alex Baia’s article in the New York Time aptly and hilariously sums up much of our ennui, ambivalence and panic all at once! We’re all puttering around our homes attempting to live our best lives while unwittingly losing our sense of time, duty, purpose and responsibility. 

So here I am, feeling a bit better because I’ve pushed this idea out of my head but also wondering if I have done it justice. Either way, I’ve written SOMETHING reflective today AND there have been no gun shots fired on my street so, blessings right?

Happy Labor Day!